A girl (who has been transitioning to be a boy) steps to the microphone. With a pack of campus kids behind her, she gently asks Charlie Kirk when she should be old enough to consider medications to advance her “transitioning.”

I have to put “transition” in quotes because no one ever truly transitions.

Body parts can be changed. Minds can be drugged. And hormones can be pumped through a child’s system—but the DNA never changes. The genome that identifies what sex you are is never altered. That’s why so many surgeries, drugs, and hormones are required to even just slightly make you “feel” a little more like something other than what you are.

Charlie Kirk knew all of this.

But like so many of the kids who would come to ask him questions, he knew that the girl’s bigger need wasn’t something that he could soundbite to her and expect all to be well.

I believe in that moment, Charlie’s heart and mind issued an immediate prayer, “Lord, let me tell her the right thing… what YOU would tell her.”

And then he did.

He told her that his opinion might not be very popular. He asked her to tell him the bigger picture of her story. He listened. And as she reiterated her question, he cautioned her.

He told her that he hoped and prayed for her that she would get an independent diagnosis for what’s going on inside of her heart and mind—before going down the path of doing some sort of permanent damage to her body.

It was most likely one of the kindest things the girl had ever been told. It ran against everything anyone had told her prior.

With humility and great care for the student, he showed her love.

The truth is, Charlie loved every student who came to his “Prove Me Wrong” microphones. It’s why he was there. Over and over, kids brought half-baked lunacy—much of which they had been spoon-fed by professors on the very campus they stood on—and Charlie listened, challenged, spoke truth, showed kindness, and loved them.

Sadly, not all who hurt want to be loved. Some want to be coddled. That wasn’t something that Charlie was interested in.

Charlie assessed that he may only ever have those few minutes with each student. It seems that he had a lot of those flash prayers go up. It seems to me that the Holy Spirit guided him over and over again to tell a student exactly what they needed to hear—even if it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

Living out the gospel was foremost. Charlie never veered.

He wanted to talk. And listen. It’s called discourse. And it is precisely the thing our culture is losing at warp speed.

Think of how upside-down we’ve become. Our colleges—once marketplaces of ideas—now function more like fortresses of ideology. Question the orthodoxy and you are “cancelled.” Challenge the narrative and you risk losing your future.

Charlie offered an alternative: discourse over violence. He didn’t shout down students. He didn’t sneer at them. He didn’t ban them from speaking. He asked them to come forward. He handed them a microphone. He gave them space to make their argument. And then—with logic, history, faith, and facts—he gently pulled apart the falsehoods.

Contrast that with the way so many “activists” now operate. When faced with an opposing view, they silence it. If they cannot silence it, they smear it. If they cannot smear it, some even lash out in rage or violence.

The results are tragic. We now live in a time when violence is no longer the last resort of a desperate ideologue—it is often the first tool in their kit. But Charlie’s legacy is that there is a better way.

It takes courage to endure boos from a hostile crowd while telling a lonely student the truth. It takes courage to say, “I love you enough to tell you what no one else will.” But it also takes courage to sit patiently, to listen to the whole story, to hold your tongue until it’s time to respond. That’s a courage most of us don’t practice anymore.

Discourse demands humility. It demands patience. It demands truth-telling without cruelty, conviction without arrogance. Charlie embodied all of that. And let’s be honest—our society desperately needs it.

If you doubt that, just look at the headlines. Political violence has become normalized. Churches burned. Pro-life centers firebombed. Conservative speakers attacked. And now, tragically, Charlie himself has been taken from us by an assassin’s bullet. Violence silences. But discourse heals.

What Charlie modeled is precisely what the enemies of truth fear most: reasoned discourse anchored in unchanging truth. The radical left can tolerate a conservative shouting back at them—it only fuels their narrative of oppression. But a conservative who calmly dismantles their arguments while showing compassion to their wounded hearts? That terrifies them.

Because it wins people, it softens hearts. It changes minds. That’s why students kept coming back to Charlie’s microphones. Some walked away unmoved, sure. But others walked away unsettled in the best sense of the word. Seeds of truth had been planted, and they would grow.

Charlie believed that even in the heat of cultural warfare, the answer was not violence. It was always discourse. And that’s why we remember him today—not just for his speeches or his leadership or his organization—but for the way he lived out the principle that every person deserves to be heard, to be loved, and to be told the truth.

Charlie Kirk’s legacy is simple yet profound: discourse over violence. It’s a reminder for all of us. We may not stand behind a microphone with a crowd of students waiting to trip us up. But every day, we encounter people who are hurting, confused, and have been lied to.

We can sneer. We can shout. We can cancel. Or—we can do what Charlie did.

Pray. Listen. Speak truth in love.

Because in the end, truth doesn’t need fists. It needs a voice. And Charlie gave his voice to that noble cause until the day his life was cut short. And that, friends, is his lasting legacy.